“Sure,” I said. “That was back when people were saying that Iowa had a recession-proof economy. We were the envy of the whole country.”

“Just like now,” K.C. said.

“Pretty much,” I agreed.

“And the state had a big surplus, too,” he said. “About $50 million, as I recall.

“Do, you remember what Bob Ray did with that surplus?” K.C. asked.

“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “He gave it back to the taxpayers as a rebate in 1980. Just like they’re going to do now.”

“And just like now, it seemed like a no-brainer,” K.C. said. “But it wasn’t. It was a terrible mistake. In fact, that’s what George Kinley said at the time.”

Kinley was a state senator from the south side of Des Moines, where he owns a golf supply store. At the time, he was one of the few truly smart guys at the Statehouse.

“The other night,” K.C. said, “I was reading Jon Bowermaster’s oral biography of Ray. Kinley has a great line where he talks about how hard it was to vote against the 1979 rebate. He said it was like voting against motherhood and apple pie.

“But George was right,” K.C. continued. “It was a terrible mistake, because once they’d cashed all the rebate checks, the farm crisis began. The state was out of money, and before long, it was borrowing just to meet expenses.

“You know what’s happening in the farm economy now?” he said. “You should; you wrote last summer that farmland values had peaked.”

“Yes,” I said. “The price of corn is down about 40 percent for the year.”